THE FANTASY WORLD OF ITALO CALVINO

By Frank MacShane; Frank MacShane, a professor in Columbia University's writing program, is currently working on a biography of the novelist James Jones.

Published: July 10, 1983

Calvino's house seemed an extension of his fantasy. Built on a low knoll, it is surrounded by thick lawns and a profusion of flowering trees and bushes. Standing on the flagstone terrace, waiting for the doorbell to be answered, I could see that Calvino had created out of nature itself an elegant improvement on the reality of the ordinary summer cottage.

The cleaning woman let me into the house. It was neat and ordered, with a high-ceilinged living room and a balcony reached by a curved staircase. Calvino was dressed in a dark silk shirt with tan gabardine trousers and leather loafers. He had a deliberate appearance that seemed somewhat alien to seaside life. His face was clearly defined, with an aquiline nose and high forehead, and in profile he looked like a Florentine prince.

I had come to see Calvino for a statement on literary translation to be used in the magazine Translation, of which I am an editor. Cordial and polite, he sat on a couch beside me, listening patiently, not commenting until I had finished.

"Of course," he said in a soft, slow voice, "I am sympathetic. Without translation I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world." He paused, and for the first time, a smile came across his face. His brown eyes flashed briefly. "If you'd prefer," he said, "we can speak in English."

I agreed, and he said he would write the statement I had come to ask for. "I could do it tomorrow," he said, "or perhaps the day after. It's a busy time for me just now."

At this moment, his wife came in and I was introduced. "No," he said, "I will do it now." He bounded up the staircase, and soon we could hear the clatter of his typewriter from the balcony.

Chichita Calvino, his wife, is Argentine by birth. She is small and chic, with red hair and a bright smile. Herself a translator, she worked for UNESCO in Paris for many years. They met there and married in 1964 and now have a teenage daughter. We chatted until the sound of the typewriter ceased, and Calvino descended with a statement he had typed out in English.

We all went over it together and then walked out into the garden where I commented on the lushness of the setting. "I was born in Cuba," Calvino answered, "and my parents were tropical agronomists. That was in 1923. Then we returned to San Remo, along the Riviera, not far from the French border. They were very scientific and my father experimented with growing avocados and grapefruit on the old family farm." Calvino admired his parents' agricultural endeavors, but he wanted something more. "I was attracted to the more suggestive aspects of plants and vegetables and to the forests that ran along the hillsides above the coast," he said. He then gestured toward the flowering trees and carefully cultivated gardens. "Ever since," he added, "I have been interested in creating a kind of apotheosis of nature."

Leaving Calvino's seaside house was like departing from an enchanted world where everything was generous, ordered and well-mannered. The contrast it made with the economic and social realities of the rest of Italy may partly be influenced by Calvino's own childhood. He was raised in a free-thinking family without traditional religious instruction. When Calvino was born, his father was 48, his mother 37. Calvino was nurtured in an enlightened scientific atmostphere, and after completing his preparatory schooling, he enrolled at the University of Turin in the Faculty of Science, where his father taught. Then, when orders arrived to enlist in the Italian army, Calvino escaped into the hills where he joined the resistance movement.

Over the next two years of the German occupation, he lived as a partisan in the wilderness of the Alpi Marittime, fighting Italian fascists as well as Germans. "For most of the winter, we had nothing to eat but chestnuts," he later remembered. "We had no arms except what we stole from the enemy, and we had very bad shoes that froze stiff when it got cold." But Calvino denied being any kind of hero. "I did my duty as I could," he said simply.

By 1945, Calvino had become so actively involved in politics that he joined the Communist Party. When he returned to Turin, he began writing for various left-wing papers and journals. He also abandoned his scientific studies and enrolled in the Faculty of Letters, eventually writing a thesis on the work of Joseph Conrad. "My university work was not central to my education," he later explained.

What was important was the friendhsip Calvino formed with two older Italian writers, Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, leaders of the prevailing school of neo-Realism. They read his early autobiographical stories and introduced him to books by American writers that they had translated. At the time, Calvino was living in an unheated garret, and every time he finished a story, he would run off to show it to Pavese and to the novelist Natalia Ginzburg, who were busy trying to organize the new publishing house of Guilio Einaudi. The story goes that they got so tired of having to stop work to read one of his stories that Pavese suggested he write a novel instead. At any rate, Calvino soon completed his first book, "The Path to the Nest of Spiders," a realistic novel based on his experiences while fighting among the partisans. Pavese accepted it for Einaudi, and Calvino was launched into the Italian literary world.